Principal Investigator: the researcher accountable for a funded project
The principal investigator (PI) is the lead researcher responsible for the design, conduct and integrity of a funded project, and the main point of accountability to the funder.
A funder's records track each grant against its PI, covering proposals, reporting obligations and outputs, so responsibility for the work is always clear.
Frequently Asked Questions
Related terms
The newest terms we've added, the words teams managing grants, sponsorship, and CSR come across most often.
Blind Review
Blind review is the practice of assessing applications with identifying details withheld from reviewers — applicant name, organisation, and often location — so that scores reflect the proposal rather than its author's reputation.
Blind review reduces one kind of bias and cannot remove all of them. Writing quality, named partners and budget scale often reveal the applicant anyway, which is why funders pair it with a declared conflict-of-interest process rather than relying on it alone.
Scoring Rubric
A scoring rubric is the document that defines what reviewers assess in an application, the scale they use for each criterion, and how much each criterion counts toward the total score.
The rubric is the instrument; scoring is the act of using it. Publishing it with the call lets applicants address the criteria directly, and keeping it on file lets a funder explain a decision months after it was made.
Reviewer Panel
A reviewer panel is the group of evaluators a funder assembles to assess applications, often combining internal staff with external experts to bring the right judgement to each decision.
Giving reviewers a shared scoring grid, managing their workload and consolidating results fairly are what keep evaluation both rigorous and efficient.
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